Computing equipment, particularly Personal Computers (PC's), are being provided with increasing multitasking capabilities, whereby multiple applications can be opened at the same time, and applications in the background can continue to run as processor time is available. Applications have taken advantage of this multitasking capability by introducing multitasking models. Applications are utilizing the tabs method to create user friendly multitasking while having the user stay within one application. Whether the application is a web browser, a word processing application, or an email application, users can navigate through a number of instances within each application and a number of different applications, all of which may be open at the same time on a single computer.
A task-focused interface is a type of user interface which extends the desktop metaphor of the graphical user interface to make tasks, not files and folders, the primary unit of interaction. Instead of showing entire hierarchies of information, such as a tree of documents, a task-focused interface shows the subset of the tree that is relevant to the task-at-hand. This addresses the problem of information overload when dealing with large hierarchies, such as those in software systems or large sets of documents.